Butterfly house

New Lynn Butterfly house

http://www.westlynngarden.org.nz/index.html

New Lynn lies on the western train and bus route of Auckland, 10 kilometres tot he southwest of Auckland city centre.

There is a lot of through traffic .

The  garden of 4.5 acres used to belong to a nursery man, Jack Clarc,  the founder of Eden Garden,

http://www.edengarden.co.nz/our-history/

 where he planted seeds and plants for Eden Garden.

When he got older, he sold this place to Eden Garden Society, in the early 80th. He must have asked the council if he could develop the plot into a garden with the help of volunteers. That land doc and eden garden society looked after the area, so they have not to pay fort the right to work on the land.

The West Lynn Garden Society is now an independent organisation of volunteers who love gardening.

The local trust gave them money to construct the butterfly house. The trust gets money from the pokey machines and this money you can ask for community projects.

30000 dollars were financed 20 years ago, and now the butterfly house must be restored. The West Lynn Garden Society just started to have 2 half payed persons to look after the books.

Regular 14 volunteers work here, and others once a month or a fornight.

At the moment you only can see heaps of Monarc butterflies in and outside the Butterfly house.

The volunteers also tried yellow admiral and the red admiral These butterflies live on stinging nettle, but the people touched it and there were problems. The admirals chased the monarc from their plants, they were quite aggressive. They also tried to breed copper butterfly. They live on sorrel, but they did not breed in the butterfly house.

The community has a propagating house and a shade house to harden up the swamp plants. They keep the swamp plants in pots and put them into the butterfly house.

From November to June the butterfly house is the main attraction. Even in winter they fly around the garden.

The garden itself has lots of camelias ( late autumn), a lot of stock plants are still around. Especially azalea and colored leaves attract people in autumn. Also rhododendrons and magnelias are of interest for garden clubs.

Since there is a fence there is not so much damage. It always happens that the children kill butterflies or pick flowers, but it is getting better. Sometimes ladies pick flowers and they must be asked to leave the flowers or small plants where they are to be seen by everyone.

The domain name, the website and the booking they have to pay.

They have weddings here up to 120 people, they also can hire the building. Childrens birthday party are famous recently.